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Pixar’s tenth film in 15 years, ‘Up’ charms with its tale of Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner (voice)), an old man befuddled and disgusted by the changes around him, and Russell (Jordan Nagai (voice)), a wilderness scout bent on earning his last badge for “assisting the elderly.”

Threatened with the forcible removal from his house, the last remaining one in the midst of a high-rise construction zone, Carl takes the drastic step of attaching thousands of helium balloons to his house so he can fly off in search of the adventure he and his beloved departed wife Ellie never got to take, the journey to Paradise Falls [Read more →]

Tags: Animation, Comedy, Fantasy, Film, Sci-Fi by Anne Dougherty
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I didn’t read ‘X-Men’ as a kid (I was more of a ‘Fantastic Four’ nerd myself) so I can only judge this film based on how well it hews to the bible it has already set up in the first three ‘X-Men’ films. By that standard, ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ succeeds…mostly.

Wolverine is by far one of the more interesting of the first-generation X-Men. He’s cranky; he carries his own moral code around like an invisible cloud often circumventing plans and strategies to do what he believes is right; he’s confident, and he’s practically indestructible. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Comic Book, Film, Sci-Fi by Anne Dougherty
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I’ve long since quit my enthusiasm for things Trek, but J.J. Abrams has made a much-needed and refreshing reboot of the franchise; however this renewal seems to owe as much to the original Star Wars trilogy as it does Trek.

Granted that Abrams and his writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman add a little time travel quirk that creates an alternate reality for this new Trek, it does come off with a bit more verve than the original series had some 40 years ago. Both the writing and the SFX have improved, just as Desilu Studios never gave Roddenberry $75M to shoot a single episode. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Sci-Fi by Victor Sparrow
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Not just another X-Files knock-off. Really.

Before that damnable show went off the air 6 years ago, all of the major broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS each tried to catch some of Chris Carter’s alt.conspiracy.ufo fire.

Fringe‘s distinction is that the show is hard science-fiction, a rare event for network television — HARD science-fiction, is based on real science, not fantasy, not urban mythology and not old Saturday matinée fare. Though there are plenty of whiz-bang moments in there, most of the spectacle on Fringe is derived from current available technology. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi, Television by Victor Sparrow
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Yeah, I saw this one during it’s theatrical release, back in 1987, and above all, I recall leaving the theater in desperate need of some mental hygene given the movie’s uncomfortable explorations of incest, S&M and the consequences of selling your soul.

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins). [Read more →]

Tags: Adaptation, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Horror, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight‘ is the latest addition to the trend of painfully overplotted comic book movies. I’m not exactly certain when the habit of inflating a paper-thin pulp story into a full-blown bildungsroman. But since the late ’80′s it’s been necessary for each comic book movie to have at least two villains and as many as 4. (Notably, Tim Burton’s 1989 movie only had one villain, The Joker.)

While this installment of Batman seems to be the most successful commercial film since James Cameron’s ‘Titanic‘, you’d think that such a movie would have to have a simple storyline to keep selling tickets at such a rapid pace, week after week. Not so, here. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Comic Book, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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During a summer that’s seen an effort of recycling everybody’s syndicated childhood programming — Get Smart, Speed Racer, live-action versions of ‘The Hulk’ and ‘Iron Man’ — some of the good stuff is getting lost over at ABC Family. “The Middleman” is Javier Grillo-Marxuach‘s television adaptation of his eponymous series of graphic novels.

But The Middleman isn’t just some dime-store comic book property, it’s a fun, literate and self-conscious treatment of semi-secret agents, superheroes and villains, a pop-culture confiture that rivals anything Joss Whedon and the Gilmore Girls ever offered up in zither’s fast-paced talk-fests. While I’ve not read the comic book, it is said to be ingenious.
[Read more →]

Tags: Adaptation, Comedy, Comic Book, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Television by Victor Sparrow
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‘Hancock‘ started it’s journey to the screen 12 years ago as a spec-screenplay by first-timer Ny Vincent Ngo, titled ‘Tonight He Comes’.

I first learned about Ngo’s screenplay through some fanboy site like Harry Knowles’ AintItCool.com. Ngo’s script created something of an uproar in Hollywood despite comic book properties being at a fallow moment after Joel Schumacher’s assumption of the Batman franchise with ‘s ‘Batman Forever‘ (1995) and the revolving door that the title role became after the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton.

‘Tonight’ launched a bidding war and got Ngo signed by CAA, jump-starting Ngo’s screenwriting career and several premium-cable writing gigs. But along the way, the script also got the attention of Writer-Producer Akiva Goldsman who bought the script and subsequently doctored it to fit his number one screen-doctoring client, Will Smith. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Comedy, Comic Book, Drama, Film, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi by Victor Sparrow
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Did anyone see BSG last night? I ask because the show seems to be suddenly be taking on a lot of pre-sequel Matrix Gnosticism — not that I feel entirely capable of making that sort of judgment,it just seems that the show’s themes are departing the ‘canon’ of Western, Hegelian rationalism.

To summarize, this episode follows Roslin, Starbuck and Baltar aboard the ‘missing’ Cylon Base-Star as they scheme to destoy the Cylon Resurrection Hub, the device that guarantees the Cylons’ ‘eternal’ life.

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS TO FOLLOW* [Read more →]

Tags: Adaptation, Drama, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Television by Victor Sparrow
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First of all, credit is due to to the website where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘ (1981), the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog devoted to the exploration of the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the explosion of the home video market in 1979.

A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or a summer vacation in the US. [Read more →]

Tags: Fantasy, Film, Horror, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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